Archive for March, 2008
Reginald Shepherd
On the Intentional Fallacy
Many of the comments in response to my most recent post revolved around the question of authorial intention and its importance or even relevance to the reading and interpretation of a work of verbal art, so I have decided to explore the question in greater depth. This post incorporates some of my prior responses to comments on that earlier post into an extended discussion of the matter of authorial intention.
One of the greatest legacies of the much-maligned (mainly by people who haven’t really read them) New Critics is the separation of the author and the text. When I read a poem, I read the poem. I have neither the desire nor the ability to discern an author’s intentions. I care about what the author wrote, not what the author thought he or she was writing. Even if one thinks of a work in terms of its author, if what mattered most to a writer was what was in his or her head, there’d be no reason to write anything, since one already has access to the contents of one’s own mind. One writes because one wants to produce something separate from oneself. I can’t imagine how I could fathom Shakespeare’s intentions, for example, or how, if I could, that would usefully illuminate his plays. In Keats’s words, the poet is no one.
Linh Dinh
This is just to say…
A motorist is pulled over by a policeman, “You ignored that stop sign.” “But I slowed down!”, the driver protests. Hearing this, the cop starts whacking the driver with a night stick while intoning, “Do you want me to stop, or do you want me to slow down?”
Poems are like musical scores, their notations to be read the same way each time by each reader, with each linebreak acknowledged with a pause. Is that too much to ask?
William Carlos Williams read his “Between Walls” three different ways on Pennsound, here, here and here (MP3s). Yusef Komunyakaa is another habitual offender of the linebreak injunction. Enjamb, yes, but don’t slur, OK?
Daisy Fried
A Poetry of Pigs
Ada Limon likens poets to soothsayers. But poets seem to me no wiser or more visionary than anyone else—possibly the opposite is closer to the truth. Poems in general aren’t so much wise or fortune-telling things as they are (some of them; no generalization does justice to the art) providers of concise moments of clarity.
T.E. Hulme, in “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” which he gave to the Poets’ Club in London in 1908, said “I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way. The President [of the Club] told us last week that poetry was akin to religion. It is nothing of the sort.”
Linh Dinh
Give Me Some
Rimbaud asked, “Why not toys and incense already?” Play and the sacred are the 69 of poetry, its yin and yang, but to really play, one must be willing to get dirty, and nothing is messier than the World Wide Waste, a vast mud pit for poets to frolic in.
Ada Limón
Ireland, Poetry & The Good Art of Being Alone
I woke up this morning thinking of the Irish. In midtown Manhattan the parade barreled through and people wore their green sweaters and talked about their heritage and well, drank some. Mainly, I thought of cultures that are inherently linked to poetry, where the legacy of poetry is something highly celebrated, is viewed as an essential commodity. Perhaps I’m dreaming that up (it’s easy to fantasize about other countries when you’re living in another, like admiring someone else’s meal). Also, today I was thinking of Yeats. Okay, while it may seem almost cliché to bring up Yeats (like bringing up Paz on Cinco de Mayo), I stare at this quote everyday on my desk:
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
And so I thought I would. Bring him up, that is. Forgive me, my average-self. This quote is also on my refrigerator, and sometimes, on days when I need it; it’s in my pocket. Also, I think, the poem in its entirety is in my memory. I see it as an instigator.
Don Share
The Poetics of Space?
When asked about why her poems look the way they do (”The Violinist at the Window, 1918,” from the March 2008 question-and-answer issue of Poetry in particular, which we had to print on a fold-out page), Jorie Graham remarked that she is “working with lines that acquire momentum as they move down the page, yet need to carry that momentum across shifting distances of breath and attention.”
Linh Dinh
Half Rigid Half Verse
A few years ago, I found myself strolling down a narrow, car-free street in Bury Saint Edmunds, a gorgeous little town in Suffolk, England. Admiring its houses’ irregular roof line, I realized that although the human mind needs patterns to orient itself, it’s also thrilled by the sabotage of these patterns, that the coexistence of order and chaos lies at the heart of the aesthetic experience.
Ada Limón
The Ides of March: Soothsayer=Poet*
Speaking of art & politics:
CAESAR
What man is that?
BRUTUS
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.
CAESAR
Set him before me; let me see his face.
CASSIUS
Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.
CAESAR
What say’st thou to me now? Speak once again.
SOOTHSAYER
Beware the ides of March.
CAESAR
He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.
It’s hard not to think of Caesar on the ides of March. All those knives, all those men of politics. However, I often find that it is not Caesar or Brutus that I think of the most, rather, it is the Soothsayer. The poor nameless fellow who wanders in to warn his dictator of the coming fall only to be shoved out of the way as men with important business to attend to go about their day. Mainly, I think, Hey, I’d like a soothsayer! Or an oracle. Or a Ouija board, a magic eight ball, even a good horoscope. Unlike Caesar (there’s really little comparison between he and I), I’d listen. Someone says, “Beware,” and I do, I pay attention.
Maybe the soothsayers of today are the poets: Poor, often nameless, often shoved aside, often shouting something that no one is listening to.
Reginald Shepherd
Art, History, Politics: A Short Note
Ironically enough, given the topic of my last post, I have been sidelined from this blog for a while because I’ve been painfully sick wth what my oncologist thinks (but doesn’t know) are new chemotherapy side effects. But I am better now, and I am back. Happy reading.
Politics, history, biography all inform and sometimes even deform art (style can be seen in one sense as the scar history leaves on art, what Adorno calls a hardening against the pressure of suffering), but they enter into art as artistic materials, and are transformed within it. And art speaks back to these things; it is not merely subject to them. To treat art as a social or economic or historical epiphenomenon is to strip it of its identity as art, and of its liberatory potential. This is why I am an adherent of what Adorno calls immanent critique.
Daisy Fried
Found Theory
The Frame
From Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Laputa, etc.,” at the Grand Academy of Lagado :
“The first professor I saw was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him…Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas by his contrivance the most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study. He then led me to [a] frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was about twenty foot square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered on every square with paper pasted on them, and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions, but without any order….The pupils…took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn the engine was so contrived that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.
“Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labor, and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which however might be still improved and much expedited, if the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames…”
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Hi Teri,
I think I'm for it. Not in a spirit of separatism, but in ... MORE »
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